thise
they are admirable. They become childish only when they resolve to
bind all by maxims which may suit themselves.

We must then, I think, absolutely eschew any abstract rules as
starting-points. What rules we may require, we must neither borrow
nor invent, but discover, during the course of our reading. We must
take passages whose power and beauty is universally acknowledged, and
try by reverently and patiently dissecting them to see into the
secret of their charm, to see why and how they are the best possible
expressions of the author's mind. Then for the wider laws of art, we
may proceed to examine whole works, single elegies, essays, and
dramas.

In carrying out all this, it will be safest, as always, to follow the
course of nature, and begin where God begins with us. For as every
one of us is truly a microcosm, a whole miniature world within
ourselves, so is the history of each individual more or less the
history of the whole human race, and there are few of us but pass
through the same course of intellectual growth, through which the
whole English nation has passed, with an exactness and perfection
proportionate, of course, to the richness and vigour of each person's
character. Now as in the nation, so in the individual, poetry
springs up before prose. Look at the history of English literature,
how completely it is the history of our own childhood and
adolescence, in its successive fashions. First, fairy tales--then
ballads of adventure, love, and war--then a new tinge of foreign
thought and feeling, generally French, as it was with the English
nation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--then elegiac and
reflective poetry--then classic art begins to influence our ripening
youth, as it did the youth of our nation in the sixteenth century,
and delight in dramatic poetry follows as a natural consequence--and
last, but not least, as the fruit of all these changes, a vigorous
and matured prose. For indeed, as elocution is the highest melody,
so is true prose the highest poetry. Consider how in an air, the
melody is limited to a few arbitrary notes, and recurs at arbitrary
periods, while the more scientific the melody becomes, the more
numerous and nearly allied are the notes employed, and the more
complex and uncertain is their recurrence--in short, the nearer does
the melody of the air approach to the melody of elocution, in which
the notes of the voice ought continually to be passing into each
o